Recent U.S. federal legislation requires a majority of high school students with disabilities and English language learners (ELL) to participate in state assessments used for accountability purposes. The federal guidelines allow the use of assistive accommodations by these students during tests to accommodate their special needs. However, the extent to which accommodations are provided to students with disabilities and ELL students varies considerably within states. For example, schools often face difficulties in providing some basic accommodations to a large number of students due to a shortage of space, equipment and staff.
Some states have written guidelines on the roles and responsibilities of people who assist in the administration of accommodations, e.g. readers, scribes and sign language interpreters. However, there is great variability in the breadth and depth of these guidelines, and accommodations are generally not delivered in a standardized or equitable manner. For example, “read aloud” accommodations provided by human readers (in which a human reader reads out the test) notably have the following problems: the quality of the readers vary widely, the readers occasionally mispronounce or mis-read words, the readers sometimes provide intentional as well as unintentional hints to the correct answer, and the students are sometimes reluctant to ask the readers to re-read parts of the test. Thus, while the students are provided with a read aloud accommodation, it is likely that all students do not have an equal opportunity to demonstrate their achievement because of the unstandardized delivery of the accommodation.
Moreover, there are significant differences between the daily accommodations provided to students during instruction and the accommodations that are available during testing. For example, students who are provided with certain instructional accommodations such as one-on-one reading assistance or auditory calming are often not provided with comparable testing accommodations. Furthermore, accommodations recommended for instruction (e.g., computers/other assistive devices) are rarely used during testing.